Etan Patz: FBI dig up New York basement in search of 'milk carton' missing child

Etan Patz: FBI hunts for "milk carton" missing child

NEW YORK — New York police and FBI agents equipped with jackhammers on Friday began digging up a basement in the ultra-trendy SoHo neighbourhood believed to contain clues to the unsolved disappearance 33 years ago of a sweet-faced, six-year-old boy.

Police shut off two blocks of Prince Street and erected a blue tarpaulin tent over the entran

ce to the basement where detectives hope finally to break the case of Etan Patz, who became America’s most famous missing child when he vanished on his way to school in 1979.

After prepping the scene on Thursday, the heavy work of dismantling the basement could now begin, FBI spokesman Tim Flannelly told AFP.

“Today will be a much more comprehensive effort. We’ll be digging into concrete, digging into drywall, getting into the nuts and bolts,” he said. “This is the second day. We’re going to go through the weekend and possibly into next week.”

FBI evidence response team trucks were parked by the tent, while a crowd of journalists and curious passersby waited for news behind rows of metal barricades. A dozen satellite TV trucks were parked in nearby narrow streets.

The grim focus of this upheaval was below the sidewalk outside a chic accessories store called Wink.

P a picture on his cellphone of the cast-iron staircase surrounded by black-painted railings.

That iron work is the kind of picturesque period detail that has made SoHo one of the most attractive, high-rent pieces of real estate in the world.

But three decades ago, officials say, this may have been at the center of a terrible tragedy.

The case was a media sensation at the time and Patz, angel-faced with light hair, became the first child in a long-running tradition to have his image put on the back of milk cartons, appealing for information on his whereabouts.

Considered unsolvable, the case was closed and Patz declared dead. But two years back, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance reopened the files at the request of the boy’s parents.

Recently, police brought cadaver dogs, trained to sniff the minutest traces of dead bodies, to the basement. Steve Kuzma, who has for years managed maintenance in the building where the basement is located, said agents arrived about a week ago.

“They showed no sign of what the dogs sniffed. There were two agents and a handler. They let the dog go and it went sniffing, but I didn’t see anything,” he said, calling the revelation that he may have been living over a murder scene “pretty scary.”

“It’s a creepy thing,” he said, shaking his head.

The longtime main suspect, a convicted child abuser called Jose Ramos, was never charged. Now attention is turning to a carpenter who used the basement, Othniel Miller, the New York Times reported.

An FBI spokesman refused to confirm this. However, Kuzma confirmed that Miller used to have a workshop in the basement.

Miller was always building things, Kuzma said. “Every time I went down there it seemed like there was a different wall. Like a maze. I suppose Miller put in those walls.”

However, he remembered nothing suspicious. “He was a very nice man. He seemed like a good worker.”

Today the streets around the search site bristle with art galleries and clothing stores too upscale to put price tags in the window displays. Tourists stare up at the atmospheric fire escapes crisscrossing the six-storey apartment buildings, while impeccably dressed locals flit between coffee shops and boutiques.

But the transformation of what was once a rough enclave for struggling artists has not erased memories of what happened — memories now painfully resurging.

“It’s not something you get over,” Jenna, a 59-year-old psychologist, said as she walked her dog past the search scene. “That was a special time,” she said, remembering the neighborhood’s bohemian past. “But this kind of overshadowed it.”

Jenna, who did not want to give her last name, said this area of SoHo was “spooky” back in the early 1970s. “It was spooky at night. It was dead, completely dead. There were no stores, the galleries closed at six. It was kind of an abandoned area.”

The intense jumble of police, onlookers, and journalists and hip locals on Prince Street uncannily resembles one of the crime film sets that frequently sprout on New York sidewalks.

But Flannelly offered a reminder that in real life the plot may not be so neat.

“People watch those shows but these things take time. It’s not 45 minutes and then you blow up the basement,” he said.